Sam Lee: 'There is a difference in the songs Gypsies sing

From the Guardian

Sam Lee didn't want to find out about folk music from archives. Instead he has trawled Traveller sites, learning from families who have passed these songs down the generations

Freda Black leans forward in her armchair, arches back her shoulders and sings a song about the boy Jesus being given a thrashing by his mother. As an 85-year-old mother-of-nine herself – now a great-grandmother too – Freda knows about such things, after living among her people, the Roma, on the road until the age of 30, thereafter in this house, "like a cage".

The song tells a strange story: about the Christ child asking "Mary mild" if he might go out and "play at ball". Jesus meets "three jolly jerkins" whom he invites to play, but they refuse because "we are lords' and ladies' sons", while Christ is "but some poor maid's child".

Whereupon Jesus "built a bridge with beams of the sun", from which the posh children fall and drown. His mother accordingly "laid our Saviour across her knee / And with a handful of bitter withy / She gave Him lashes three".

The "bitter withy" is willow, and for its part in the story, the tree was cursed to "perish at the heart" – rot from within – as indeed it does. "It's in the Bible," assures Freda. "I can't read, but I know it's in the Bible."

"It isn't in the Bible," says a young man sitting on the floor, entranced by the song, "but what matters is that it's in your Bible, Freda." His expression during the performance has been almost as interesting as the song itself – eyes fixed upon the singer, absorbing every timbre of tone, every intonation, every rhythmic lilt, half-mouthing the words as though singing some silent, inner harmony to himself.

Sam Lee is one of Britain's finest singers and the most cogent force of his generation in British folk music; an heir to the great revival during the 1950s and 60s led by Martin Carthy and the Watersons, and Fairport Convention in their wake. Lee brings contemporary folk music back to whence much of it came: Roma, Gypsies and Scottish and Irish Travellers, who have passed these songs from generation to generation, over centuries. He scours Britain for those whom many avoid or despise – travellers in camps or housed – to learn their lore and songs. And a first collection makes up his debut album: Ground of Its Own, nominated for a Mercury award last month. When Freda Black talks to him about "your music" on the album, he replies: "Not my music, Freda, it's yours."

For her part, Freda was born on Christmas Day in Somerset to a Romany mother and father "who knew everything about a horse". The family moved to the south-east when Freda was five, to weave baskets, train horses and work as circus performers, among other things. Freda, raising infants in caravans and around campfires, hawked antiques door to door, before being installed under a roof during the 60s as part of a government drive to get travellers off the roads they had navigated for a millennium and more. Many more of her people were housed during the Thatcher administration, when some 65% of sites were crushed. Labour continued the policy, Jack Straw proclaiming open season in 1999 when he said there was "too much tolerance of travellers" in Britain. Those who still resist are modern Britain's outcasts, as demonstrated by the violence at Dale Farm last year.

Freda married a man from that other ancestry of Travellers in Britain, pre-Celts from Ireland and Scotland, so that her nine children are "mixed" – but pure highway. Two of them, Freda Bell and Kathleen, listen now in this front room at Headley, Hampshire.

It's hard to gauge who is happiest to be with whom – Lee with the women or the women with this young man who has sought them out so eagerly. But their trust is not automatic: "You've worked for this," Freda tells Lee. She sings a song called The Pied Straw, to which Lee says: "You're only the second person in the world I've heard sing that." "Who was the first?" retorts Freda. "A farmer in Norfolk called Harry Cox," replies Lee. "You've studied all this, haven't you, Sam?" "Maybe too much!" he laughs.

Lee was born to a Jewish family of artists in Tufnell Park, north London, from a Polish ancestry of tailors on his father's side. He attended a private school where "I was miserable, the bullied Jewish kid, because I was uncompromising in my refusal to be interested in what everyone else was interested in. But I saw those pains as something I had to fill." There was the Judaism in his family and "the richness of ritual singing. My father used to call it God-grovelling – but he'd say, 'Listen through it and enjoy the bits you enjoy.' "

But schoolboy Lee filled the pain at the antithesis of school: the Forest School Camps to which he went during holidays. These offered "a kind of Quaker- and Native American-inspired alternative to Scouts – teaching kids a new way of living; building a community in the wild, breaking the rules of health and safety, turning children into wildwood folk, encouraged to 'sing everything you see'". There was, he recalls, "an FSC songbook, a mongrel of 60s pop songs, north-east mining songs, union songs, American folk songs, English drinking songs and murder ballads."

His path was charted, but not yet found. Lee graduated from art school in Chelsea and secured work dancing in a burlesque West End show near Leicester Square. He would scramble across roofs into the (unlocked) bookshop on the top floor of the Photographers' Gallery, where he would rehearse, unknown to its owners. "At one point, I took the music director and dancing girls to show them these wonderful books, climbing over the roofs. I suppose that's what I do – climb into other worlds."

Lee harboured two great loves: singing and the wild – as he saw it. "What is wilderness in this country," he ponders, "where there is no real unspoilt land? I see wilderness in Britain as stinging nettles submerging a disused rubbish tip. Or a Gypsy camp, washing hanging between the caravans. Gypsies and nettles fit into any landscape, and Gypsy folk song is made-up cultural nettles."

Lee alternated performance nights at the burlesque club with days researching at Cecil Sharp House (the north London headquarters of the English Folk Dance and Song Society), a double life that involved, he recalls, "sitting under the table backstage, surrounded by dancing girls attaching their nipple tassels, learning songs by old shepherds".

He looked to find his way through a folk world in which, he says, Martin Carthy and the Watersons had "set the bar" in terms of performing, and in the wake of whom he felt a "terrible sense of filtration" of folk music. "There was something not quite pure in all this learning from archives. I wanted to go upstream, get to the roots. I discovered Jeannie Robertson, the great Scottish Traveller ballad singer, Harry Cox and the Copper Family – and I wondered, who are these people? I bought their CDs and was blown away. I thought, I have to learn all these songs.

"There was this difference between songs the Gypsies sang and songs you learned at Cecil Sharp House," he says. "I love the songbooks, but I decided I'd rather throw flames on what tradition is left out there. The Gypsies are our Native Americans: they practise a kind of shamanism mixed with Christianity and the old beliefs."

The glory of folk music is "this latency – the power within to express these things, like the power within everything, trees, plants, the inanimate". Lee's love of song was inseparable from his love of nature and he felt this in the travellers' songs: "I'm a tree-climber," he says, "and this music is for me like being up in the branches, knowing you are connected by its roots, deep into the earth."

Lee's muse appears to be a kind of paganism: "It's about respect, really, for these gods, whatever and wherever they are, and the land. When you're close to the land, respect it. Know that whatever you do, every plant you pick, will have consequences. I know that even walking through a wood has an impact, which makes me lightfooted." Pantheism? Paganism? I ask. "I'm hesitant to put names to it," he replies. "Just look for this sense of sanctity in the land and find it in song."

Most of this interview takes place on the terrace of a house that has been in my family for nearly five decades, near to Freda's. Lee and I had arrived late the night before through lashing rain, now blown away by a strong, cold wind in which Lee is happy to sit out in now looking across the downs and at red kites on the wing searching for carrion.

There is an otherworldliness about Lee that prepared him for the often spectral adventure that awaited him. "There I was, working in burlesque razzle-dazzle, wearing hot pants sprayed with glitter," he says, unaware then of an imminent meeting that would change his life.

Stanley Robertson, who died in 2009, was the nephew of Jeannie Robertson, Scottish Traveller and ballad singer nonpareil. Robertson had taught songs to Martin Carthy, and toured himself. "I went to hear Stanley sing ballads in Whitby," recalls Lee. "I was so amazed that afterwards I followed him up the cliff steps, opposite the abbey ruins on a stormy night at sea. I caught up with him leaning under an arch of whale bones, clutching the heart that would kill him in the end. I told him it had been wonderful and he answered, 'I know a thooosand ballads.' I trembled, and said, 'I want to learn every one of them.' He didn't know anything about me – but he got me. He knew I could take this on and learn this canon of songs."

Robertson suffered a heart attack soon after "and medically he died. But" – Lee talks in deadly earnest – "he must have done so in order to revisit his ancestors". Robertson recovered and lived three more years. He invited Lee to Aberdeen and took him for a walk along the Old Road of Lumphanan, where, according to legend, Macbeth was finally defeated and traditional terrain for Scottish Travellers.

"He did this ceremony," says Lee. "He gave me his ring, and an ingot, a pebble, which I carry around with me, talisman for a keeper of songs. 'You are the custodian,' he said. 'You don't own the songs, you look after them for the next generation.' So this is my life now. I can't go out on Saturday night dancing and having sex. It's my privilege, but yet again, I'm driving up the A90 to Aberdeen to learn songs and back again overnight in time for work.

"So here I am, looking around for Gypsy camps, knocking on doors, asking about songs, and usually people are grateful and amazed that someone cares. I went to see a man once in Weston-super-Mare and after we'd talked about songs for hours, he went to the back of his caravan and handed me a bottle of champagne."

And so it is that the album up for a Mercury this year is made of songs by a Sussex shepherd called Enos White, or learned from a Surrey horse-dealer called Jasper Smith and, of course, from Stanley Robertson.

In the grounds of Glastonbury Abbey this wet summer gone, Lee plays at composer Charles Hazlewood's innovative Orchestra in a Field festival, accompanied by a range of instruments from India and more traditional folk accoutrements. Above all, however, there is this voice.

The climax of the afternoon is My Ausheen – My Old Shoes – learned from Robertson, on which Lee's tonal range and rhythm stroke the nerves exposed; the singing is sickened at heart, but beautiful. About a man watching his sweetheart wed another, the lyrics have a strangeness of their own: "How many blackberries grow in the salt sea?/ And I gave my reply with a tear in my eye/ As many ships sail in the forest." The instrumentation is potent but eerily restrained; at once authentic and psychedelic. Few listen, for it is early afternoon at the festival, but those who do are spellbound.

These include one man who has heard these songs many times before. Joe Boyd is the alchemist of modern English folk, the man who, apart from producing Bob Dylan's first electric set at Newport, discovered and brought forth Fairport Convention, Sandy Denny and Richard Thompson, Syd Barrett, the Incredible String Band, Nick Drake and others.

Boyd has become a kind of special adviser to Lee. "Two things stopped me dead in my tracks when I heard him," says Boyd over pasta near his home in Maida Vale, London. "One is that he's learned something very important about how to sing a song. It's there in the fact he went to Aberdeen to learn – it marks him out. Sam didn't learn from people who had learned from other people. He broke the chain in what has become a very middle-class, derived way of singing among folk revivalists. If you go around Gypsy camps to learn from the originals, it makes for a totally different way of singing.

"The second important thing, if not the most important, is rhythm. There was a time when most folk revivalists moved away from unaccompanied ballad singing. The Watersons had raised the bar and the way to manage was to play folk music with a guitar, which for most people brought you rhythmically into a ubiquitous kind of mid-Atlantic country-blues thing. To avoid it, you had to play like Martin Carthy or Richard Thompson, who rooted what they did in dance rhythms, but for most it's that plodding guitar, and singing to match.

"Sam has leapt forward and over all that. He sings these rhythms that are abstract, but to the extent they're rooted in anything, they're rooted in the unaccompanied ballad. His voice floats in the way the unaccompanied singers float, rhythmically. Then he brings these wonderful colours to the rhythm."

But, Boyd adds: "All this of course is secondary to talent. He has this extraordinary talent, energy, charisma and musicality."

Back in Hampshire, Freda Black tells another story "from the Bible", another curse, this one against her own people, explaining that "it was Gypsies what stole the nails from the man who made them" for Christ's crucifixion. Lee adds that, according to lore, Gypsies actually made those nails, thus sentencing their people to be nomads for all time. This story is "in the Bible, if you read it right," insists Freda, "or some other book."

The girls, says her daughter Freda Bell, "taught ourselves to read because we went to school for about a month, then moved on somewhere else", but the wisdom is passed by word of mouth. The conversation switches to a tale cursing people who refuse charity to those who wander, personified by Jesus: about a woman who refused food to an itinerant and was turned into an owl. The skies are full of strange birds, continues Freda, including "great eagles that take babies, to kill and eat".

Have you seen them? asks Lee. "I've seen that," Freda replies, "at Box Hill. About five o'clock. Great birds going to roost – to take babies and kill them." Then she adds, pensively, of her time on the road: "There was a lot of things about in those days that's not about now."

Such as "whiplash snakes", says Freda Bell, "that moves in cartwheels", a mythical creature she had "seen in the Devil's Punchbowl" at nearby Hindhead. Kathleen calls it a "throwing snake – in the wheatfield, I could swear".

Is it something a Gypsy would see that ordinary folk do not? asks Lee. He tells the women how in Scotland, people tell him they've seen selkies and water sprites "that the rest of the folks don't see". "We never thought about it that way," says Freda Bell, "but we've got an eye for things."

"I could talk in Romany, but I don't think you'd believe what I was saying," adds her mother. "We don't talk to other people about what we see."

Except to Sam Lee, it seems. "There's things Mum'll tell Sam that she won't tell anyone else!", notes Frida Bell. And with reason.

Lee's affinity to wilderness, and sensitivity to other planes, did not only bring him to these people - it enables him to conjoin what they know. To walk or even drive the lanes with Sam Lee is to take a botanical tour through herbal and fungal lore – he knows the name of every mushroom, tree and plant, and usually its folkloric meaning or medicinal application.

When we take a walk across Frida Bell's field, that her mother might gather herbs and plants from the hedgerow, we get talking medicine. "We know all about herbs, instead of going to the doctor," says Frida Bell. "Mum would give us Elder bloom, and boil it in a pint bottle. And when that bottle was gone, there'd be no boils or sores, no teenaged spots." Both daughters look remarkably young for their age, their beauty preserved. "We never went to no hospital," affirms Kathleen, "Mum put us out in the field. That's where we learned about animals and birds, and about how they know to survive. It just shows – if you leave things alone …"

There's talk of what the "Bread and Cheese Tree" – the Hawthorn – can do: "Jesus put it wild, for the poor people". There's plantain leaf for whooping cough, and Sam Lee concurs. He knows and uses the names they use: an apple becomes a "poddle"; Lee and Freda discuss the medicinal virtues of a "Bog Whortle". Necklaces were made, explains Frida, from dried berries of Deadly Nightshade "and put around babies necks, under their vests so they couldn't get at 'em – and not a tear shed from teething". She adds that "my mother had eight children in a caravan, and I had some that way myself. Nowadays they go into hospital and makes all that fuss!"

Kathleen says people talk about how hard it was in the old days, "but it's much harder now". How so? "Mentally harder, which is worse than physically hard. The pressure of things. Posh educated people in governments making it impossible to keep head above water."

"Putting us in houses," adds Freda Bell, "like birds in cages. The songs were part of our freedom and they still are." "We used to sing on a Sunday while they were making up tents," says Kathleen. And, intriguingly: "Rhodie Black used to sing while we was hop-picking. Everyone would go quiet when this lady sung while we worked" – an astonishing Travellers' echo of the holler that begat the blues on the cotton plantations of Mississippi. "They'd shout: 'Come on Rhodie, strike up a song!'"

The women explain how their ancestors come from India. "We're not Gypsies, we're Romany," explains Freda. "The Irish Travellers married into our families, but they're a different race," adds Kathleen.

Most of Freda's songs come, she says, from her father-in-law: "Best singer I ever heard in my life – said he was born coming over on a ship from Ireland. My husband would make a fire, we'd gather round and his father would sing." Hence this entwinement in travellers' songs between traditional Irish, Scottish and what Lee delights in calling mongrel-English folk. Gypsy songs are usually all and none of these, crossbreed folk music, beloved by Lee. Yet after nightfall, Freda turns to her husband's roots to sing with a power and beauty that send shivers down the spine, a lament not from Somerset, but the land clearances and famine:

"Fare thee well old Ireland, and a sad farewell/ The boat is ready sure I'm leaving you/ But oh my fond heart would sooner bide/ Near Eileen's grave by Lough Sheelin side."

When she finishes, the company is a little stunned and the room silent but for rain against the window. A melancholy hangs on the air, not from the song, but Kathleen's asking: "Who's going to remember all this? Kids nowadays – all they have is Xboxes. My daughter – she's a lovely voice – but sings all this modern stuff. We had freedom, but it was safe, and wherever we went, there was always a song to tune up. Who's going to learn all these songs and pass them on?"

The women tell stories about ghosts they've seen, but Lee wants to hear that song again. "The melody changed," he tells Freda, "from the first to the second verse – I've never heard that before."

"That's me," replies Freda.

"I want you to teach that version to me," says Lee.

Night has darkened and deepened now, rain lashing the scrappy estate and reluctant traveller home, pristine but for our half-eaten fish and chips, cold on the floor. Freda readies herself to sing again and the young man, cross-legged, leans forward, heedfully, unblinking, as though this treasure would vanish for all time were this moment not preserved.
Play it again: Sam Lee's favourite folk songs

Tan Yard Side
I learned this from [Suffolk singer] Phoebe Smith. It's sung with a pulsed/pumped shruti box, which, like the Gypsies, has an Indian origin. The song examines the melodic integration that birdsong has within our national ear; the nightingale, the rarest singer of them all, is an African bird that flies to England for the summer and not the other way round!

My Ausheen (My Old Shoes)
A song learned from Stanley Robertson, my teacher and mentor, who never got to hear my finished version. It features the vocals of his aunt, Jane Turriff, a Traveller in her 90s who's still alive. She sang this wee verse in the 60s. Stanley was a master storyteller and I wanted to create an acoustic narrative around this very tragic story.

Jews Garden
This is a very personal story for me, a heavy rewrite but based upon the ancient ballad of Little Sir Hugh, or the Jews Garden. It was written as propaganda, which instigated the mass pogroms in England during the 1320s. Thousands of Jews were killed and this tale was both fan and fuel inciting the ensuing genocide.

Goodbye My Darling
This is a song I never, ever tire of singing. There is something so compelling and direct about this farewell lament from one lover to another as he is being transported away for seven long years. However the persistent sense of bittersweet hope that perseveres in the song carries all the sentiments of a people who have lived with ongoing separation, loss, persecution and judgment, so has no doubt been crafted by generations of Gypsy singers who have all felt that ache so acutely.